


moonlight through the pines

by slashsailing



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy Era, Character Study, Established Relationship, Estrangement, Georgia, Homecoming, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-15
Updated: 2014-03-15
Packaged: 2018-01-15 20:59:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1318978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashsailing/pseuds/slashsailing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard McCoy takes Jim home to Georgia; the only thing is he hasn't been home himself in two years and he hasn't told his mother he's coming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	moonlight through the pines

_**moonlight through the pines** _

Eleanor McCoy sieves flour into an old porcelain bowl; it is pale blue on the outside and ridged, but it is smooth and cream on the inside, and even though it was once her mothers, and has been used to make sponge cake and biscuits for the last forty years, it remains without crack or chip or even the smallest of nick. Today she’s making bread. It comes as easy as breathing; the motions of her creation flowing through her without conscious thought or need for reference.

She is wearing an apron; usually she’s a woman bound into close-fitting dresses, which have turned into tailored skirt and jacket ensembles as she has aged, but today she is wearing marl grey leggings that are soft against her skin and a huge white t-shirt that she may have bought nearly thirty (or is it over thirty?) years ago when she first found out she was pregnant. It is long enough to cover the curve of her ass;  _not sagging yet_ , she thinks proudly, and she rolls the oversized sleeves up neatly to keep them from hanging awkwardly halfway between shoulder and elbow. They’re not necessarily clothes that need preserving, but she likes the security of the apron strings tied around her waist.

She is a small woman; shorter than most of the women she knows and much shorter than the men that reside in her home, as well as the one that left it two years ago. Eleanor is slight too, and on some days she fears that her face looks gaunt. If David were around he’d tell her she looked beautiful as ever, crows-feet and all. But he is not here.

Neither is her son.

She grieves for them both, sighing at the bowl before her.

Bread, she thinks, probably requires some level of passion she no longer has.

Eleanor sets the bowl aside and leans forward, elbows bent on the countertop, she frowns at the window, at the sight of their backyard, at the sight of the forest and the creek in the distance. Pulling the material of her t-shirt between her fingers, Eleanor thinks about the small boy with big hazel eyes that would eagerly stand beside her while she baked, trying, perched on tiptoes, to reach the counter and offer his help. She thinks about the meek boy who would toddle around the yard frowning at field mice. She thinks about the boy learning to ride. Her boy.

She thinks about him often. The man he’s become. The man she no longer knows.

She misses the man. Her boy. Her son.

She can hear the sound of a car in the driveway. Not Horatio’s pick-up truck or the small two-door engine that her mother-in-law insists on driving.

Eleanor wipes her hands on the apron, pushes the bowl further away from her and makes her way across the kitchen and down the hall to the front door.

It’s strange to see him again, especially with him so acutely on her mind of late. It’s just past  _that time of year_. Maybe he feels guilty. He should have called. She’s not ready.

He looks well, though, healthy.

There is a blonde man who gets out the other side of the Jeep.

“Leo,” is all she can manage, hoping that her confusion and myriad of questions filter through the void.

“Mama,” he says, looking nervous. Of her? That can’t be right. Leo has never been nervous of her. “I was gonna call,” he assures her, although Eleanor doubts he is telling the truth.

“Who’s your friend,” she asks.

“Jim Kirk,” Leo introduces, casting a look back in his companion’s direction.

“I was thinkin’ about you,” she admits, “just now, isn’t that strange?”

“I’ve missed you too, mama,” Leo whispers; like he’s simultaneously afraid and ashamed of the words. Or maybe ashamed at having to say them at all, having left it this long.

“You boys had better come inside,” she smiles. It’s tight, erring on false, but it’s all she has to offer either of them. There’s certainly no bread. Not yet.

Although perhaps she can muster enough feeling now to get the job done.

#

_**the road leads back** _

“Are you sure we should just turn up at the house?” Jim wonders, looking out the window at the miles of dirt road that they leave behind them as they drive down what used to be a big highway for Georgia but has now been pretty much disregarded as the State has developed over the last hundred years or so.

Leonard hasn’t told Jim much about what to expect, nor does he plan to; he’s not all that sure himself. Two summers ago he left a small town just outside Atlanta and ran away to Starfleet. He hadn’t spoken to his family since. He’d been scared at first, but that in turn had given birth to a distance Leonard just wasn’t sure he knew how to breach. They had once been so close; but that was before he killed his father and been divorced by his wife.  _With good reason_ , he reminds himself, he always does. Jocelyn wasn’t to blame for the breakdown of their marriage, Leonard made a fine mess of that himself.

The young doctor had turned inwards after the death of his father just before his twenty-seventh birthday. He’d put a rod between himself and his wife, a red hot poker, actually. It burned to touch and sooner or later, after weeks and months of trying to pry it out from in between them, with scolded fingers, Jocelyn gave up. She fell out of love. Or lost the man she  _did_  love. And filed for divorce.

Leonard’s life had gone to Hell in a hand basket in less than a year and it hadn’t taken much to finally drive him to the bottle full time.

He’d moved back into his mother’s. But how was it fair on her? To watch the man who ripped her husband away from her pad around the house like the son he no longer could be to her. So he’d left, found Starfleet and tried his hardest not to look back. 

But he’d made good again. At least his friends and colleagues at the Academy thought so. Jim certainly did. He was no longer the space-fearing drunk who’d bandied his anger and depression around that small shuttle like a protestor’s flag. He’d gone to great lengths to get his drinking under control, he’d cut his hair, he’d battled his aviophobia, his claustrophobia, his vertigo… He’d try to become a man he could be proud of. A man his mother could be proud of.

He’d wanted to call, but what would he have said?

“It’s the only way I can think of doin’ it, Jim,” Leonard admits. “Call me a coward bu-”

“You’re not a coward,” Jim says, setting his hand on his lover’s thigh.

Leonard takes his eyes off the road to look down at his own jean-clad leg where it is now overlaid with the milky skin of an all too familiar hand. He and Jim have been at this for a while now. This tentative attempt at a monogamous relationship. Sometimes it’s easy as breathing, like slipping on an old t-shirt. Other times it’s…it’s not. It’s hard and confusing.

“She’ll like you,” Leonard assures Jim as they pull into the driveway, “she will.”

#

_**arms reach out to me** _

Jim watches as Eleanor ushers them into the house; she isn’t what he expected, she doesn’t look forty, never mind the fact that she’s nearing sixty. There is a fragility to her that he’s seen mirrored in Bones. They’re the sort of people who have been made strong but crumble sometimes just to relieve the pressure; like old Roman architecture. Beautiful and majestic but worn around the edges, and vulnerable to the elements.

“You’ve come home?” she asks Bones gently, not looking at Jim.

“Just for the summer,” he replies, “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

“You just left,” she murmurs, turning to a blue bowl on the kitchen counter.

“I’m sorry,” Bones repeats.

Bones isn’t usually so repentant. He apologises to Jim only when something he says makes Jim lose his smile. It isn’t often, hence Jim’s preconceived notion that Bones just doesn’t so sorry. Doesn’t do regret.

Jim knows that last part isn’t true though. Bones regrets deep and hard. Bares grudges only against himself. The death of his father, the death of his marriage and this: the death of his mother’s trust.

But maybe he can finally make this one right. One less thing for Bones to regret.

Jim smiles at Eleanor, “you’re making bread,” he notes, “my grandfather, Tiberius… he was a man for bread.”

“Takes patience,” she inclines her head, as if trying to look inside Jim. “You must be a patient man to put up with Leo.”

Jim frowns. Bones didn’t introduce Jim as anything more than an acquaintance, but the allusion, the insinuation, is clear in Eleanor’s voice.

“I’m a mother, dear,” she says gently, smiling, her eyes shining with something as she turns to squeeze her son’s forearm, looking Bones in the eye while still seemingly addressing Jim, “I know these things.”

“Jim’s a veritable saint,” Bones scoffs, trying to segue the tension into something more pleasant, less pressured.

“With a halo of blonde hair,” Eleanor nods, eyeing them both. “Leo always did like a blonde,” she stage whispers and Jim laughs.

“We’re usually trouble,” Jim admits, offering her a rueful look before smiling again.

“I find that most people are,” she says, “but they usually make good.”

There’s a silence then, as the gazes of three flicker over each other. Mother to son. Son to lover. Jim looks at Eleanor and nods, “they certainly do.” 


End file.
